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Argenteuil RCM is a regional county municipality or RCM in the Laurentides region of western Québec, Canada. Its seat is Lachute. The map in Wikipedia shows the location of Argenteuil RCM in relation to Québec as a whole. The RCM covers 1,306.60 km2 (504.48 sq mi) and in the Canadian census of 2011 it had a population of 32,117. More than 80% considered their mother tongue to be French, but there are still a number of English speakers who trace their roots to Loyalist settlers of the late 18th and early 19th century.
[edit] HistoryIn 1682, Charles-Joseph d'Ailleboust was granted by Louis de Buade de Frontenac, Governor General of New France, a domain of 186 square kilometres (72 sq mi) of land. This fiefdom was bounded by the Ottawa River to the south, a line through the center of the hamlet of Carillon in the west and Clear Lake (Lac Clair) to the north. Since Ailleboust already owned a house in Argenteuil near Paris, he called his domain "Argenteuil Seigneury". In 1697, the Lord of Ailleboust and his wife Catherine Le Gardeur sold their seigneury to their son Pierre d'Ailleboust d'Argenteuil. Subsequently over the years, the fiefdom was held by Pierre-Louis Panet (1761-1812), and then by Major Murray. After the conquest of New France by the British in 1759 during the Seven Years' War, the British implemented their laws, but maintained certain French seigneurial rights. In 1796, Jedediah Lane, from Jericho, Vermont, bought from Major Murray several thousand acres of land on both sides of the North River (Rivière du Nord), where Lachute is today. In 1809, Thomas Barron bought the land of the territory that would become the center of the town of Lachute. Five years later, Sir John Johnson (1741-1830), a Loyalist from New York who had resettled in Canada after the American Revolution, bought the rest of the Argenteuil Seigneury. He built a sawmill and gave land for churches, helping to attract new settlers to Argenteuil. In 1854, the Parliament of the Province of Canada (Canada East and Canada West) abolished the seigneurial system, and the County of Argenteuil was created the following year. In January 1983, the Argenteuil Regional County Municipality succeeded the County of Argenteuil. [edit] Subdivisions
[edit] Research Tips[edit] French names for placesBecause French is the one official language of Québec, WeRelate employs the French names for places within the province. Many placenames will be similar to their counterparts in English, with the addition of accents and hyphens between the words. The words "Saint" and "Sainte" should be spelled out in full. Placenames should be made up of four parts: the community (or parish, or township, or canton), the historic county, Québec, Canada. You may find placenames red-linked unless you follow these conventions. [edit] Local government structureThe Province of Québec was made up of counties and territories. Counties in Québec were established gradually as the land was settled by Europeans. Each county included communities with some form of local governement (often church-based). Territories referred to the undeveloped sections under the control of the government in charge of the whole province at the time. The communities included townships and/or cantons, depending on the English/French makeup of the county concerned, and also included ecclesiastical parishes with somewhat different boundaries which could overlap with local townships or cantons. Ecclesiastical parish registers have been retained and are available to view (online through Ancestry). Since the 1980s many small townships and parishes are merging into larger "municipalities", often with the same name as one of their components. Beginning in 1979 the historic counties of Québec were replaced by administrative regions and regional county municipalities (abbreviated as RCM in English and MRC in French). Regional county municipalities are a supra-local type of regional municipality, and act as the local municipality in unorganized territories within their borders. (An unorganized area or unorganized territory is any geographic region in Canada that does not form part of a municipality or Indian reserve. There is a list in Wikipedia.) There are also 18 equivalent territories (TEs) which are not considered to be RCMs. These are mostly large cities with their suburbs, but include 4 very large geographical areas where the population is sparse. The administrative regions (above the RCMs in the hierarchy) are illustrated on a map in Wikipedia. The regions are used to organize the delivery of provincial government services and there are conferences of elected officers in each region. The regions existed before the change from historic counties to regional county municipalities. The above description is based on various articles in Wikipedia including one titled Types of municipalities in Quebec NOTE: WeRelate refers to Québec communities as being within their historic counties because this is the description which will be found in historical documents. FamilySearch and Quebec GenWeb follow the same procedure. However, it is always wise to know the current RCM as well in order to track these documents down in local repositories and also to describe events which have taken place since 1980. Because the former or historic counties and the modern regional county municipalities can have the same names but may cover a slightly different geographical area, the placenames for Regional County Municipalities or "Territories Equivalent to regional county municipalities" are distinguished by including the abbreviation "RCM" or "TE" following the name. Historic counties (which were taken out of use in about 1982) were made up of townships or cantons. The two words are equivalent in English and French. Eventually all the Québec cantons in WeRelate will be described as townships. Many townships disappeared before 1980 with the growth of urbanization. If the word parish is used, this is the local ecclesiastical parish of the Roman Catholic Church. Parish boundaries and township or canton boundaries were not always the same. The WeRelate standard form for expressing a place in Québec is township/canton/parish, historic county, Québec, Canada,
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